Men Who Have Sex With Men

April 27, 2017 7:17 PM

20 stories of same-sex hookups from straight men.
posted by The Whelk (32 comments total)

Dear Penthouse,

We drank some whiskey and one thing led to another and we ended up sucking each other's dicks and making out for a while.

That's hot.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:37 PM on April 27, 2017 [18 favorites]

Yeah, I resemble these remarks. My actual real crushes have never quite aligned with the times of messing around, which has left me between these guys and fully comfortably being able claim the mantle of bisexuality without feeling like a bit of a poseur, but it's not been unfun?
posted by ominous_paws at 7:43 PM on April 27, 2017 [4 favorites]

Sounds like they're getting bi.
posted by misfish at 7:50 PM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

A remark from the sexually liberated era of the 60'/70s: I was convinced,at the time intellectually, that every human could sexually interact with another human of any other gender. However, my philosophical attempts at hooking up with a guy did not turn out well. My revulsion at whiskers and erections sound like gay revulsion at the soft wetness of women.
posted by kozad at 8:04 PM on April 27, 2017 [11 favorites]

Double
posted by lalochezia at 8:17 PM on April 27, 2017 [19 favorites]

As a straight-ish but unsure man who's had a few flings with men that never escalated to sex on the basis of my not wanting to treat another human being as an Experiment, ...a lot of these stories are super fucking hot.
posted by invitapriore at 8:47 PM on April 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

I went through a period in my mid-20s after a really, really upsetting breakup where I just wanted nothing to do with women whatsoever (life lesson, don't be the guy someone cheats on her boyfriend with and then break it off just when you're both falling madly, desperately in love with each other). For the next few months I was totally put off by women, to the point that I realized I was really only attracted to other men.

The problem is that for years I'd also been hearing people say that men who hook up with other men inevitably turn out to be gay. I heard this from straight women (an ex told me that if I had ever been with a guy the relationship wouldn't work because it would mean I was secretly gay), and I had gay friends who used to talk all the time about the "two beer queer" who "thought he was straight, but I proved otherwise." So I never pursued any guys, even though there was one guy in particular, a friend of a friend, that I really hit it off with (we both really loved disco). Frankly, I just wanted to mess around, and I didn't want to have to completely reevaluate my identity, or have other people reevaluate it for me. I was honestly worried that if I fooled around with a guy once, I'd discover I was gay, and I'd never get to sleep with a woman again. I liked sleeping with women (younger me didn't always think things through).

Eventually I started being attracted to women again, and now I've been with the same person for years and have no intention of leaving her. But there's always been this curiosity, like what if I had been just a little bolder and broadened my horizons? I could have had some fun times. You only live once, and I missed the chance to have the experience of making out with a dude while listening to Kashif (sorry Chris, it was me, not you).

My point here is that we need to stop telling men that their entire sexuality can be defined by one experience, or even many.

It's too late for me, but ah well. At least I still have disco.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 8:57 PM on April 27, 2017 [24 favorites]

So, uh, are there any reputable sites/forums where these exact sort of non-fiction stories are shared and/or compiled and/or categorized/indexed? Asking for a friend.

yes, some of us women do find it super hot
posted by bologna on wry at 9:10 PM on April 27, 2017 [18 favorites]

i was at the big annual gay disco party thing in wellington like 25 years ago, high as a kite, wandering round enjoying the swirly colours over everything etc when a man leaned out of a nearby portaloo, looked me over, and said 'do you have the time' in an urgent sort of fashion and i said 'no i don't have a watch sorry' and he narrowed his eyes and said 'do you have the time' and i shook my head helpfully and wandered off.

In retrospect, I'm not sure he actually cared what time it was.
posted by Sebmojo at 9:14 PM on April 27, 2017 [51 favorites]

It would be nice if boys had the same level of freedom to make out with their male friends in a fun, low stakes, just-playing-around way that girls do (or did when I was a girl, I hope that's still a thing, it was awesome). I think then a lot of boys would work out they are bi a lot sooner (or at all) and with a lot less stress.
posted by misfish at 9:20 PM on April 27, 2017 [12 favorites]

The weird thing is these guys have little problem with the former but get really weird about the later.
posted by Artw at 10:26 PM on April 27, 2017

Metafilter: This all makes me sound pretty gay but I'm really not.
posted by Tiny Bungalow at 10:55 PM on April 27, 2017 [10 favorites]

"This all makes me sound pretty gay but I'm really not."

That was such a hilarious bummer of a line.
posted by klangklangston at 12:10 AM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

Huh, I've never heard the term "heteroflexible" before but I kinda like it
posted by Hermione Granger at 12:14 AM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

One of my friends has this uncanny, totally unconscious talent for attracting 98%-straight dudes, who suddenly decide they want to mess around with him, and him specifically. I have no idea what it is and I'd be lying if I said I weren't a teensy bit jealous.

I also think I've said this elsewhere on MeFi but if it weren't for heteroflexible/bi-curious straight dudes semi-ironically dry-humping me I would have never gotten any male attention in high school at all. You know, when you're not completely out of the closet and your parents want you to move all the way back in, you take what you can get, even if it comes with a lot of hyphens.

But for serious, the more people's experiences I hear (IRL, especially) the more I think the kind of experimentation described here is actually really, really common. I hope anyone out there who's reading this and who's done stuff like this doesn't spend any sweat on the patriarchy's one-drop rules about male sexuality. It's really shitty and pervasive -- I even know a lot of gay people who buy into that shit, and yet nobody questions my sexuality (gay) even though I had some mutually-fulfilling sexual experiences with women in high school, because (much like whiteness) it's only heterosexuality that's so fragile.
posted by en forme de poire at 12:15 AM on April 28, 2017 [44 favorites]

It would be nice if boys had the same level of freedom to make out with their male friends in a fun, low stakes, just-playing-around way that girls do

I kissed a guy and I liked it.
posted by MartinWisse at 2:58 AM on April 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

As someone who went to a moderately traditional English public school, I've always understood that a bit of mutual masturbation in the showers was normal.
posted by Segundus at 3:20 AM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

the patriarchy's one-drop rules about male sexuality

Oh my God, this is perfect.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:31 AM on April 28, 2017 [27 favorites]

Double

That's what he asked for!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:43 AM on April 28, 2017

(I'm a woman, so forgive me for speaking in this thread and I'll just make this one comment.) There aren't too many things that make me wish I were a young person growing up in this era instead of my Gen X childhood. The social media bullying/drama/danger alone is terrifying. But the one thing I do wish for is a freer understanding and flexibility w/r/t sexuality, because I would have liked more fulfilling experiences with girls/women aside from drunken makeouts. But I only ever seem to *crush* on dudes even if I find women attractive and I think that's as much from growing up thinking dude crushes were the only option and if things were different, who knows.
posted by misskaz at 7:04 AM on April 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

I've long complained that one unfortunate side effect of LGBT liberation is that it forced everyone to pick sides. There's lots of evidence that men in America (and elsewhere) have been having sex with other men for a long, long time without it necessarily being a Big Deal. But come the 90s when being Gay was a specific identity, men started getting more anxious about casual sex with other men. AIDS undoubtedly had an influence on this too.

Or so I thought; the current generation of young'uns seem much more comfortable with fluid sexuality. That seems healthy to me. This Buzzfeed article is mostly people in their early 20s who seem to have adopted the view that a bit of experimentation is just fine; good for them.
posted by Nelson at 7:20 AM on April 28, 2017 [7 favorites]

But see: Spalding Gray's momologue 47 Beds, where he pursues his curiosity with a guy but when it gets to the point, he feels like "I was choking on what felt like a disconnected piece of rubber hose..."
posted by msalt at 7:26 AM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Nelson: I don't think that's an effect of LGBT liberation. In the 90s, gender queering seemed like the natural direction of LGBT progress.

But I do wonder if recent publicity over trans issues -- particularly the Caitlin Jenner example -- has had a bit of that effect, being presented as "everyone can choose whatever team they want" in a way that presumes, reinforces or even re-asserts the need for the existence of teams in the first place.
posted by msalt at 7:28 AM on April 28, 2017 [1 favorite]

Wow. A few of these stories could have been me. No drunken make out sessions ever, but I honestly up with guys from the internet when I was lonely from 18-21, and many of my experiences were like these men. I struggled with arousal (did not realize how much of my sexual attraction came from romantic feelings then), but had fun in a low key sexy way.

My last boyfriend (I'm 29 now, was 28 when we dated) was my confirmation I have a two way door, but it prefers to swing one way. I was just getting warmed up to the idea of sex - we had been doing for a couple months at that point - when he got really pushy and creepy about it, and I said GTFO.

Favorite sexual experience ever though was handling a dude's HUGE hardon while he was having sex with my then girlfriend. He was like as thick as my wrist? An impressive size, needless to say, and I was very very worked up by him, regardless of what was going on. She commented he was a little big to use it the way he did after we finished, which was also a learning experience.
posted by thebotanyofsouls at 7:53 AM on April 28, 2017 [5 favorites]

Most of the trans guys I know are absolute catnip for these kind of guys. However, I generally don't want any part in it because they often don't see me as a "real man" and fuck that shit.
posted by AFABulous at 8:22 AM on April 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

But come the 90s when being Gay was a specific identity, men started getting more anxious about casual sex with other men.

I agree with this. Lots of guys don't identify with "gay culture" even if they like other men. And they don't fit into the scene at all. Yeah, there are twinks and bears and jocks and theoretically everyone should be able to find a niche, but I don't find that to be true. There doesn't seem to be space to be identifiably gay and just a dude who likes dudes without any of the cultural trappings. Once you say "I'm gay" people make all kinds of assumptions. I don't fangirl over Beyonce or like old movies or whatever. I am fine with being out of the closet as gay - my sex with men is not casual - I just have trouble with what it means as an identity.
posted by AFABulous at 8:43 AM on April 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

Lots of guys don't identify with "gay culture" even if they like other men.

I don't want to say that I identify with "gay culture" as a straight man, because I know that would be problematic, but that line where the guy says "this makes me sound gay but I'm not" is sort of my life story. I've had people telling me I was gay since I was 12. Bullies, obviously, but also well-intentioned adults who would say things like "you know, it's OK to be who you are, and if you ever need to tell me something I'll be there for you" (which was especially shitty because I had gay friends who needed an adult to say that to them, and had nobody). It's like growing up with sexuality gaslighting: "sure you're straight, uh huh, we know you're not in denial about anything *wink wink*."

So eventually I started wondering if I really was gay. I remember after a friend told me a story about looking at himself in the mirror and saying "I'm gay," I tried it myself. I looked in the mirror and said "I'm gay," just like my friend had. I just kind of stood there and thought "hmm, that doesn't seem right." But still, everyone else knew I was gay. It was ridiculous. I remember after a gay friend asked me out on a date, I got all a-flutter and thought "oh no, I really am gay after all!" and I was really upset because I had a big crush on this girl, and I knew she wouldn't want to go out with a gay guy like me (it seriously took me like two months to figure that one out).

And the thing is, I always liked girls, but I was more or less assured that I'd realize I liked guys so much more. So naturally the one-drop sexuality rule hit me hard, because by my mid-20s I was finally getting less of that crap, and then suddenly I had a rough breakup and I wasn't into women for a little while. And there it was in my face again, as if everyone I'd ever known was there to say "we told you so!" No wonder I was never brave enough to experiment.

I'm in my 30s now, and I'd gone a long time without being told I was gay, but last year, a gay guy said to me "you're gay as shit" and I just said "yeah, totally." Because I give up. Gay as shit. I used to be a disco DJ. My wrists are limp sometimes. I guess that means I have no say in the matter.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 2:39 PM on April 28, 2017 [9 favorites]

"I've long complained that one unfortunate side effect of LGBT liberation is that it forced everyone to pick sides. There's lots of evidence that men in America (and elsewhere) have been having sex with other men for a long, long time without it necessarily being a Big Deal. But come the 90s when being Gay was a specific identity, men started getting more anxious about casual sex with other men. AIDS undoubtedly had an influence on this too."

It's not so much LGBT liberation as the pseudoscience of Victorian and Edwardian medicalization of sexuality, combined with the long-simmering homophobia of establishment Christianity.

Like, prior to the 1880s or so, "homosexual" wasn't an identity in the West so much as a descriptor of acts. Spaces were so gender segregated that there was a lot of room to have an official, propitious opposite-sex relationship/marriage, as well as same-sex sexual interactions. The boundaries between same-sex agape, eros and philia weren't bright lines.

But that shifted when a medicalized notion of sexuality, stuffed full of trendy psychoanalytical and quasi-Darwinist theories as well as a huge dollop of misogyny, were used to explain people who persisted in same-sex activity beyond the bounds of social propriety. That's when you start seeing a proliferation of anti-gay "sodomy" laws, as well as the emergence of the "homophile" movement.

Same-sex sexual activity has persisted any time there is significant sex segregation, and for most of modern history (especially when the gender binary was even more understood as congruent with sex) we've had significant sex segregation in huge institutions, i.e. the armed forces, schools, prisons, etc. And that's where you see a lot of self-reported same-sex sexual interaction.

If I had to guess about how gay liberation would influence that, I'd say that the necessity of coming out to forge a political identity has made the idea of a gay identity more prevalent, and by doing so, forced more people who have same-sex sexual interactions to have to consider their identities in a way that the previous heterosexual norm didn't require. I'd think framing that as forcing people to pick sides is buying into a lot of problematic assumptions about where the pressures are coming from and how the "sides" have been defined.

I do think the link between anxiety over identity and AIDS with regard to MSM is probably a pretty salient one, if for no other reason that the number of times I've seen gay men writing in the '80s describing having sex with another man as a political act and a life-and-death choice. But I also think that 200 years from now, people will still be writing books (or i dunno injectable meme flashes or whatever) about how AIDS shaped gay identity in a million different ways.

Something tangential that I do find interesting is that, if I recall correctly, people of color are no more likely to self report having same-sex sexual interactions than white people, but are more likely to identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual. I wonder if white people are more comfortable with the mantles of privilege, and so more likely to not let individual actions contradict their core identity.
posted by klangklangston at 3:06 PM on April 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

None of my straight friends ever tried to have sex with me. I'm bitter.
posted by bracems at 7:23 PM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

posted by thebotanyofsouls at 7:53 AM on April 28

Nbd but if I start a fanfare post for this comment would anyone else be interested or
posted by ominous_paws at 7:46 PM on April 28, 2017 [3 favorites]

Same-sex sexual activity has persisted any time there is significant sex segregation, and for most of modern history (especially when the gender binary was even more understood as congruent with sex) we've had significant sex segregation in huge institutions, i.e. the armed forces, schools, prisons, etc. And that's where you see a lot of self-reported same-sex sexual interaction.

I am late to this party, but I do want to restate that the concept of "homosexuality" as we define it in Western cultures has historically been pretty alien. Ancient Greece and Rome, pre-colonial Japan, China, and different areas of the Middle East (yes, even Islamic societies)--it was pretty normal for men to hook up with men or visit male prostitutes, and in some areas was even considered an essential bonding experience. After all, what could be more masculine than a man associating with other men? You can find plenty of romantic poetry of guys writing about their deep affection for a friend, and yet few of them would consider themselves "gay" in the sense that it was an orientation and they were exclusively involved with other men. You still got married and loved your wife and had children. It was just something you did.

I remember doing a research paper on homosexuality in the Middle East, and the history there is both fascinating and sad. In one super-interesting case in Oman that demonstrated some pretty fluid attitudes to both sexuality and gender, a young man might dress as a woman, refer to themselves as a woman, and their society just considered them to be women. Any man who had sex with them was having heterosexual sex. But at any time they could begin living as a man again and the community accepted them as fully male.

But then European nations came in and immediately stigmatized the behavior, and the extreme anti-homosexual, conservative attitudes you might now see in many of these countries are the result of this colonial influence. Though the binary view of "gay" versus "straight" was still problematic--in one essay I read the Middle-Eastern author complained that when he moved to the USA everyone wanted to put him into a "gay" box. He disagreed with the idea that his relationships with men were an identity and not just a preference, like having a favorite color or food.

Anyway, it's also pretty normal for boys to explore their sexuality with one another, just as a matter of course, but identify as straight. It's strongly frowned upon, so many men look on that behavior with shame, but it's totally natural.
posted by Anonymous at 7:14 PM on April 29, 2017

Interesting (if not very gracefully written) Guardian article on the topic.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:34 PM on May 2, 2017